“The digressive nature of ‘Moby-Dick’ really suits the medium of going online,” Mr. Hoare said. “The book was never edited. It’s quite analogous to a kind of blog, really.”

The democratic list of readers includes celebrities like Ms. Swinton, John Waters and Stephen Fry as well as fishermen, schoolchildren and a vicar. The youngest is Cyrus Larcombe-Moore, a 12-year-old who contributes a few lines of dialogue to a chapter read by his teacher, Tom Thoroughgood.

Germany is known for many things: reliable cars, punctual trains, a national reluctance to cross the road if the lights are on red. Comedy, though, not so much.

Yet the country’s reaction this week to the death of its most beloved postwar comic, aged 87, shows that Germans do indeed take their humour very seriously.

It is a measure of the devotion inspired by Loriot that when his death was announced the foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, told journalists at a press conference on Libya that he would take questions on the comic only after he had answered all Gaddafi-related queries.

Loriot – real name Bernhard Victor Christoph-Carl von Bülow, better known as Vicco von Bülow – was a national treasure who combined the eloquence and linguistic dexterity of a Stephen Fry with a Peter Sellers-style sense of the absurd. Pretty much every German newspaper on Wednesday carried a picture of him on the front page, or one of his cartoons, rather than an image from the battle for Tripoli.